Sunday, November 24, 2013

Here are a few more clips from the David Munrow TV special posted earlier. The show was called Early Musical Instruments and aired in 1976. There were 6 episodes, each involving Munrow and a group of wan Englishmen making a racket with a certain family of instruments - reed instruments, strummed ones, percussion, etc. Some of them are positively evil looking, such as the gemshorn, a recorder made seemingly out of satan's antlers, or various guitar-like monsters with about twenty strings and nightmarish dragon-like tuning heads. The series was filmed at the beautiful and eerie Ordsall Hall in Salford, known for the ghosts of a White Lady and young girl that have been seen in its staircases.
Munrow tragically took his own life at 33, but his legacy carries onwards and upwards -- one of his recordings was on the golden disc accompanying the Voyager spacecraft into the heavens in 1977.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

This Estonian nature film is so soothing. Two brothers find wolf puppies and a crane and raise them. There's a melancholic Kes vibe here that I really like... reminds me of the weird European nature films that my relatives in Japan were always watching on TV whenever we visited them when I was a boy. Watch.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

That Kimiai film made me think about kites. The colors and materials and geometries of kite-flying are so beautiful. Try doing a google image search for 'tetrahedral kite'. Kite fan culture of the 70s almost mirrors the underground environmental art and inflatables of Ant Farm or whoever. Here are some images from KiteLines magazine from the late 70s. You can find PDFs of every single issue of this magazine here. Start with the earliest issue and travel forward in time - totally amazing.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Quick follow-up about This is Tomorrow -- one of the visual props in the film is this beautiful book by Max Parrish of the London County Council. Must have come out right around the time of the festival itself in 1951. Beautiful color illustrations by Gordon Cullen.